Academia’s Dollar Dance
J.D. “Jim” FoxWhat a shocker! New evidence that money is not only the mother’s milk of politics, but also of elite higher education!Please. As someone who ran PR at one Top 10 school and taught at another, the only things surprising to me are the now-slamming side doors — soccer and crew? I taught international graduate students whose parents didn’t seek financial aid, so I already knew about the relative ease of admission for those paying full freight.Do you feel sorry for anyone in the current scandal? Certainly not the One Percent Parents — especially the should-be-ethical lawyers. Probably not the hyper-entitled kids who brag on Instagram that, to them, higher education equals stadium partying — when they’re not busy on dad’s yacht fulfilling their rigorous obligations as social media influencers.I have good friends who work in elite advancement (aka development, aka fundraising). They endure intense pressure to raise funds and nurture alumni relationships, essentially trading on the reputations of their storied institutions. And do their best around high-maintenance faculty and administrators whose expectations are dependably pointed north.It’s always been a dance between what donors give and what they can expect to get. A building with your name on it will certainly enhance your kid’s prospects, but apparently not with the certainty of legacy admissions (just ask Yale about the Bush family or Harvard about the Kennedys), or the now-under-scrutiny side doors, with potentially hundreds of indictments yet to come.In the middle of it all — my friends who work to build those annual scholarship funds and endowments in spite of the awful press. Their jobs just got harder, again.
About the Author: J.D. “Jim” Fox is Head Coach at Next Act Coaching. https://nextactcoaching.net/
